The Real Monuments Men Are Even More Heroic

And they're still saving world treasures for us

In George Clooney's The Monuments Men,you will see heroic soldiers risking, and yielding, their lives to save Europe's art treasures. While theirs is a story of the Second World War, we should not dismiss the idea of soldiers prowling smoldering ruins and racing hostile forces to protect and recover artworks as merely the realm of history. Soldiers stole art as a military tactic since the days of ancient Rome, and Napoleon preceded Hitler in having an entire unit of his army dedicated to art theft. But while the Monuments Men are the best known of the soldiers-as-art-rescuers, their role continues in the US Army to this day. And their story is even more interesting than Clooney's Hollywood tale.

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While I have enormous respect for members of the Armed Forces, the idea of being a soldier, fighting for my country, holds no appeal to me. I don't kill anyone, not even in video games, and I'm no good at being told what to do. But if push came to shove, and I were obliged to suit up for my country, there is one role that I would be honored to hold in the Armed Forces: the modern equivalent of the Monuments Men.

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The Monuments Men were a group of some 300 Allied officers, most of them artists, architects, historians, or conservators, who were called upon to locate, protect, and recover art and monuments looted or damaged by the Nazis during the Second World War. Officially called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Division, this under-funded and under-supported cluster of brilliant, brave, and creative individuals was the brainchild of an eccentric British archaeologist (and great friend of Agatha Christie) named Sir Leonard Woolley and a group of blue-blood American art museum directors. In March 1941, in reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States set up the Committee on Conservation of Cultural Resources, which planned how to defend American art and monuments against foreign invasion. But while the invasion of America was one concern, art historians including the director of Harvard's Fogg Museum, Paul Sachs, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art director, Francis Henry Taylor, were also worried about Europe's vast cultural treasures, which were already in the line of fire. Theft of art aside, there was significant danger that museums like the Louvre and the Uffizi, and monuments from the Coliseum to Chartres Cathedral, might be damaged or destroyed by stray bombs and gunfire. Calling on their powerful connections, including a direct line to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sachs and Taylor encouraged the establishment, in 1943, of the American Committee on the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. Chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, its unwieldy nomenclature quickly shifted to become known as the Roberts Commission. Within a matter of months, the commission completed over 700 annotated maps of art and monuments in Europe and Asia, distributed to military commanders, so that damage to the treasures highlighted on them could be avoided, whenever possible. These maps also had a second agenda: Knowing where art should be located allowed officers to determine what was missing, and perhaps stolen. The commission's role extended into the field, protecting cultural property in conflict zones alongside the soldiers, as long as that protection did not interfere with critical military operations. The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch was set up as the field arm of the Roberts Commission.

Several officers were assigned to each Allied Army. Clooney's film is misleading in a number of ways (as are most films that make Hollywood dramas out of true history). To facilitate narrative and create more of a buddy movie, The Monuments Men throws together eight of the real officers who served — but who, in actuality, worked in disparate parts of Europe and rarely saw one another. The two most cinematic stories of art in the Second World War are indeed the focus of the film, the thefts of Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna and Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (also called The Ghent Altarpiece), though the stories of their theft and salvation have been simplified. The film tells of some real Allied heroes, including George Stout, a pioneering conservator who was de facto leader of the Monuments Men; Rose Valland, a French librarian who secretly worked as a spy at the Paris museum where the Nazis gathered art looted from throughout France; and Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein, the team that discovered the fact that there was a Nazi art theft program, that Hitler planned to assemble a city-wide museum containing every important artwork in Europe, and the location of the thousands of stolen works destined for that museum, which were stored in secret in a salt mine converted into a high-tech art warehouse, deep in the Austrian Alps.

The Ghent Altarpiece, arguably the most important painting ever, saved by Monuments Men. (Photo: Getty)

Theirs is perhaps the most dramatic story: A fortuitous toothache led them to a cabin in the woods, where a former SS officer and art adviser to Hermann Goring was in hiding. He told them about Hitler's museum, the ERR (the Nazi art theft unit), and the mother-lode art storehouse in an Austrian salt mine. At that moment, in 1943, it was all news to the Allies, but this new intelligence suddenly explained the widespread disappearance of thousands of artworks from throughout occupied Europe. Hot on the trail of The Ghent Altarpiece, the most-wanted object by Hitler and arguably the single most important painting ever made, Posey and Kirstein raced with General Patton's Allied Third Army to the Austrian Alps, in an effort to save the thousands of masterpieces hidden there from the hands of a renegade local SS officer who was determined to destroy them all, rather than lose them to the Allies. The destruction of the choicest contents of the Louvre, Uffizi, and dozens of other museums was narrowly averted, thanks to the heroism of local Austrian miners, the detective work of Posey and Kirstein, and the covert efforts of a team of British-trained Austrian double-agent commandos, who parachuted into the Alps and used guerilla tactics to delay the mine's destruction (the story of the Austrian commandos inspired the Richard Burton film Where Eagles Dare, but did not make it into Clooney's Monuments Men).

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With much written about the Monuments Men thanks to the Clooney film, one might well wonder about the legacy of this division after the Second World War — and just what I might volunteer for, should my services be required by our country.

Dr. Laurie Rush is a modern-day Monuments Woman. Her official title in the U.S. Army is Cultural Resources Manager, but folks refer to her as "the Army Archaeologist." An archaeologist by training, she works in support of the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army, one of the most-deployed units in Afghanistan and Iraq. From 2006 to 2011, she spearheaded a project to increase awareness of the cultural heritage sites that U.S. soldiers would encounter while in the field — a holdover from the Second World War, when it was understood that teaching soldiers of the value of the art and monuments in the path of the fighting would encourage them to protect it. You can understand that a soldier, dodging bullets, might not think twice about a pile of rubble — but if they have learned that that "pile of rubble" is all that is left of a once-great Roman city called Leptis Magna, as British soldiers in Libya in January 1943 were taught by proto-Monuments Men, then they will show more respect to the site and do what they can to avoid its unnecessary damage. Dr. Rush employed the same techniques in recent conflict zones, developing decks of playing cards with notable archaeological artifacts on them, and giving lectures in the field to soldiers.

There was a gap in military employment of "monuments officers" between the Second World War and the recent conflicts in the Middle East, and Dr. Rush notes that Major Corine Wegener was the first serving Monuments Officer since 1945. During the Iraq War, Major Wegner responded to the damage to the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. And while not strictly a "monuments officer," Colonel Matthew Bogdanos of the U.S. Marines received deserved fame when he first helped secure the Baghdad Museum against looters, and then helped to track down thousands of looted objects, restoring the majority of the museum's collection.

"The model for cultural property protection has changed and expanded to fit the demands of today's complex conflicts," Dr. Rush explains. "My work is focused on education, planning, and awareness with a goal of preventing damage or destruction whenever possible with less emphasis on recovering works of art and objects." While today's "monuments officers" do not chase down stolen art (with some exceptions, like that of Colonel Bogdanos), their role is just as important — perhaps more so, since war has grown increasingly distant, computerized, un-manned, and so it would be all too easy to press a button from an aircraft carrier to remotely drop a bomb on a site, and not realize that thousands of years of archaeological treasures might be up in smoke. Dr. Rush has endless admiration for the heroic Monuments Men of the Second World War, who risked their lives in the field to protect and recover lost art. "Even though I have traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan," she says, "I could never equate my role with the courage of the men and women who have put on the uniform and saved heritage."

Judge Arthur Tompkins, who teaches a course on art in war every summer in the Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, run by ARCA (Association for Research into Crimes Against Art), explains why he finds the Monuments Men so remarkable: "They were so small in number — tiny, really, compared with the vast armies active in Europe on both sides — but their legacy continues to be invaluable and enduring, both in terms of the work they did in ensuring as far as they could that the Allied Forces did not bomb or devastate many of Europe's artistic and cultural treasures, and in terms of the artworks they protected, found, saved, and ultimately returned." Judge Tompkins notes that the Monuments Men were working directly against a far larger, better-funded, and more-organized Nazi art theft progam, determined to strip Europe of its cultural heritage for resale, private use, and also to assemble Hitler's planned super-museum: his vision for a city-wide museum in his boyhood town of Linz, Austria, which would contain every important artwork in the world.

Until December 29, 1943, the Monuments Men struggled to gain recognition and resources from the Allies, but on that day, with the invasion of Italy impending, Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower issued an order: "Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which, by their creation, helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows." Though human lives were not to be compromised, whenever possible Allied soldiers were ordered to protect and preserve cultural monuments.

Thanks to Eisenhower's order, and the courageous activities of the Monuments Men, the majority of the estimated five million cultural objects affected by the Second World War were preserved. When you wander the Louvre, the Uffizi; when you visit The Ghent Altarpiece in St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent; when you see that monuments like the Tower of Pisa still stand, we have a very special breed of war heroes to thank.